Autumn Blues

Autumn is here in the city.  The flowers on my patio are no longer pastel with the touch of soft summer's sun, but deeper, richer tones of auburn and purplish crimsons in the heather of the season, and in the countenance of cabbage roses which tell a story of heroic waiting before renaissance. 

 

The sky is perennially fish belly white.  The many shades of slate, dove and ash grey alternating with gusts that blow starlings helter skelter across an open expanse.  Just this moment a heavy platoon of military grey clouds are fast tracking westwards to upstage the paler, bile yellow canvass behind them, as though they were in a hurry to meet some appointment before daylight goes.  The days are so short now, so if I rise too late and miss the short spell of early sunshine at dawn, I would not likely see the sun again for some days to come.  

 

There is smoke in the air.  Not the juicy meat-flavoured aromas of summer from someone's patio barbeque, but a damp, musty scent of straw and compost on their funeral pyres, a fiery sacrifice to honour the giving of the land.  Green life comes to a standstill and fields once teeming with choruses of waving corn and wheat now stare at brusque, husky attention - enforced fallowness of dried, decapitated sentries to mark the passage of time and the seasons.

 

On the electrical wires criss crossing the countryside birds sit and ponder the approaching winter. Swaying gently with the electrical buzz of the circuit under claw, they calibrate their birdie brains to survival mode, envisioning the onslaught of unexpected hailstorms which might harden out of the blue,  and guard their minuscule avian hearts against the shock of grief - the sudden loss of flightmates from any quarter, for any reason.  Probably only half of the flock ever makes it through to sunnier climes each autumn.  And it is in the swoop and fall of these feathered migrant souls that one might catch songs of melancholy, even as they steel their small selves against inevitable Nature's cull.

 

As I watch, sniff and listen to the sounds of Fall everywhere around, I too gather my warmer fleeces about me, anticipating the work yet to come with the brokenness of the migrant homeless.  My heart cracks a little at the remembrance of faces from last winter, swells with unwelcomed grief over unresolved lives.  And the song that escapes from my heart echoes the blue notes of swifts and swallows, lamenting the loss of summer's warmth and summer's homes, and dreading the raze of winter's storms beyond the steel grey horizon.